Landscape Study of Potentially Essential Patents Disclosed to ETSI: A study carried out in the context of the EC ‘Pilot Study for Essentiality Assessment of Standard Essential Patents’ project

In November 2017, the European Commission issued a Communication ‘Setting out the EU approach to Standard Essential Patents’1 in which it calls for increasing transparency on SEP2 exposure. In 2020, the European Commission published a commissioned report3 that aims to evaluate the technical and institutional feasibility of performing large-scale essentiality checks of patents, titled ‘Pilot project for essentiality checks of Standard Essential Patents’.
This study is a companion to the above report. Since patents disclosed at Standards Developing Organisations (SDOs) may be a starting point of such essentiality analyses, this study aims to (1) provide a patent landscape analysis of SDO disclosed patents (and what this implies for their use as input to an essentiality assessment mechanism) and (2) analyse whether SDO disclosed patents differ from comparable other patents in quality (both technical merit and economic value). This study focuses on patents disclosed to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), This SDO is not only very important in the field of telecommunications, but also maintains one of the best databases of such disclosures to date.